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text add to our understanding of the ways in which literary and nonliterary discourses (such as political, scientific, economic, and educational theo‑ ries) have influenced, overlapped with, and competed with one another at specific historical moments? 4. What does the literary work suggest about the experience of groups of people who have been ignored, underrepresented, or misrepresented by traditional history (for example, laborers, prisoners, women, people of color, lesbians and gay men, children, the insane, and so on)? Keep in mind that new historical and cultural criticism usually include attention to the intersection of the literary work with nonliterary discourses prevalent in the culture in which the work emerged and/or in the cultures in which it has been interpreted and often focus on such issues as the circulation of power and the dynamics of personal and group identity. 5. How has the work’s reception by literary critics and the reading public— including the reception at its point of origin, changing responses to the work over time, and its possible future relationship with its audience— been shaped by and shaped the culture in which that reception occurred? Depending on the literary text in question, we might ask one or any combina‑ tion of these questions. Or we might come up with a useful question not listed here. These are just some starting points to get us thinking about literary texts as new historical and cultural critics do. Keep in mind that not all new histori‑ cal or cultural critics will interpret the same work in the same way even if they focus on the same theoretical concepts and have the same purpose. As in every field, even expert practitioners disagree. Our goal is to use new historicism and cultural criticism to help enrich our reading of literature by helping us see how literary texts participate in the circulation of discourses, shaping and shaped by the culture in which they emerge and by the cultures in which they are inter‑ preted; by helping us see the ways in which the circulation of discourses is the circulation of political/social/intellectual/economic power; and by helping us see the ways in which our own cultural positioning influences our interpretations of literary and nonliterary texts. The following reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is offered as an example of what a new historical interpretation of that novel might yield. In the terminology of the cultural critics, it analyzes the cultural work performed by the novel. I call my interpretation of Fitzgerald’s novel a new historical reading because it doesn’t have the kind of overt political agenda often associated with cultural criticism and because I rely rather heavily on terminology associated with new historicism. However, the overlap between the two fields is such that my interpretation could also be called, quite legitimately, a cultural critique, espe‑ cially because my argument makes no distinction between Fitzgerald’s canonized “classic” and various forms of popular culture informed by the same ideology.
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